


if / else / then

by orphan_account



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life, Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Half-Life VR But the AI is Self-Aware, Stream of Consciousness, i guess?, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27110914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There’s a mirror on the wall of Benrey’s room. Small, at the wrong height- far too low, even for someone of his smaller than average height. He doesn’t remember how it got there.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 47





	if / else / then

**Author's Note:**

> hi hi hi (waves) just a warning this is all about sentience and self awareness so! a BIG tw for unreality specifically related to video games and virtual reality! it's also a lot of stream of consciousness with lots of run on sentences and long paragraphs so you might find parts of it hard to read. very sorry. i dont know what came over me.

There’s a mirror on the wall of Benrey’s room. Small, at the wrong height- far too low, even for someone of his smaller than average height. He doesn’t remember how it got there.

_ (Your memory’s been bad lately. You’re not sure when it started.) _

At Black Mesa, rules are important. Rules are key. Schedule is necessary. Caution means clarity. When the work you do is as dangerous as it can be in Anomalous Materials, dealing with objects that are brought in from God knows where, exchanged with quiet whispers and the shuffling of a briefcase behind closed doors- when from behind eight separate layers of different metal doors you can still hear the pained screeches that are just too strangled to be human, the constant scrabbling, the scratching, the shriek of a claw against bullet-proof glass- then of course rules are important. Rules are to be followed. Rules are his job, so of course it’s normal to have every protocol, every regulation, every order from his higher-ups practically carved into the back of his head, burning holes against his skull ( _ there’s a new rule today, and it’s the day of the big test, you have to remember, because other people’s lives are on the line) _ and Benrey knows, Benrey is so certain there are rules against mirrors, or more specifically, mirrors like this.

In fact, this specific mirror violates several rules. Some not even rules that he has to follow; he may not have memorised the OSHA handbook like Tommy, but Benrey knows enough to be sure that broken glass is a workplace hazard, and there is broken glass on the floor of his room, and the mirror is missing a chunk right next to the left side of his chest, and there’s a wide, sprawling crack across the glass that cuts its way through his right elbow and snakes its way like an outstretched hand up to cradle the side of his neck, and then disappears altogether at the frame, or lack thereof. The crack bisects his lower right arm from the rest of his body, like an amputation, but less bloody- well, at least Benrey assumes- he’s never seen an arm being amputated, and he doesn’t especially want to, but he’s seen plenty of injuries, plenty of colleagues having their heads splintered open by a bullet, or a creature he can’t quite trace back to the farmland animals he’d trace over with crayons as a kid  _ (at least you assume you did- that’s a thing kids do, right? But you don’t remember doing it, but you must have at some point, or at least learned about animals, or went to school, or had a childhood, because all humans are kids once, it’s a-) _ it’s a general rule of humans, Benrey knows, that when shot, or stabbed, or torn open by an animal that definitely isn’t of this world, humans bleed. They bleed hard and long and scarlet and stain floors that will be clean by the time he passes them on his next shift, and sometimes they scream, or make odd, gasping noises akin to crying, albeit without tears; but most of the time they don’t do anything, just stare agape at the wall as their gun clatters to the floor and their body seems to lose all will, strength sapped by a single hit and spray of red, collapsing into a heap. 

_ (But you don’t scream, or cry without tears- because that’s a perfectly normal thing, and you just have a very high tolerance for pain, and you bleed, oh God do you bleed, so there’s no cause for alarm, even if the bleeding is usually not accompanied by any ache or itch or some vague signal that something’s wrong, and you’ve been told you needs to check your shirt and face for blood stains after shifts because if you show up looking like that in the cafeteria again there will have to be action taken, and you can’t lose this job because then you don’t know where you’ll go, because you’re not sure if there’s-) _

There’s no blood on Benrey, which is to be expected, because he just woke up- or rather, his alarm went after he had been staring at the ceiling on another sleepless night  _ (is that seven in a row? Eight, perhaps? Or have you lost track again?) _ \- and there’s no blood on the mirror, just these cracks and chunks missing that, instead of revealing the back of the wall or a board to hold the glass steady, give away to absolute nothingness, pitch darkness that must be a trick of the dim, flickering fluorescent light that soaks his room in a consistent dull cream that matches the consistent temperature of 68 degrees and the consistent schedule of getting up, going to work, introducing himself to whoever he’s on shift with because if it’s not Jeff then they probably won’t recognise him and Benrey won’t care to learn their name or face because they’ll be gone or dead in a week, and then going home, back to his room that has unworn shirts scattered across the floor and an unmade bed and bad lighting and a CRT hooked up to a PlayStation 2 and no fucking mirrors on the wall because Benrey doesn’t need a mirror, why the hell would he need a mirror, especially not one so shattered it’s leaving a cavernous hole directly over where he should be able to read his name tag, and who the hell would even gift him a mirror like this?

That’s a good question, actually. Who  _ would  _ give him a gift? A shitty, useless gift, but a gift nonetheless. Benrey doesn’t have that many people that care for him, mainly because trying to make friends in Black Mesa is like trying to strike up a conversation with roadkill- and trying to make friends with Benrey in particular is like if that roadkill was a hedgehog, already tucked into a neat little ball and bristling, bearing its spikes in every direction, having given up on trying to limp away before the car even hit but it’ll be damned if you’re going to get the satisfaction of seeing the blood on its fur. But despite that, there are a few people he can think of; people who have taken the time to learn his name and the effort to not get shot at (or at least, not shot and killed, in Jeff’s case), and so Benrey has done the same in return. But none of them are the gift-giving type, or not the type to give gifts that seem more suited to a cheap bathroom wall than the bunk of a minimum wage security guard working in an underground facility (and when he says cheap, he means  _ cheap,  _ like even without the very obvious cracks and the fact it’s hanging so low he can only see his torso it’s just a reflective glass square, no nice frame, no shape, just pure function, except it’s so broken it’s not even capable of doing that).

Tommy is the obvious answer, because Tommy, oh, Tommy is just great- and he means that genuinely, Benrey doesn’t know how they even became friends other than Tommy has the persistence and patience of a saint- well, that, and those wide brown eyes that always look like they’re seconds away from pooling with tears and a constant supply of soda and snacks that are  _ so  _ much better than the tasteless slop molded to look like burgers that’s served up at the cafeteria, and Benrey doesn’t actually think the candy and chips Tommy has taste of much either, but that might be a Benrey problem now that he thinks about it- but the point is that Tommy is his friend, his best friend, and Tommy definitely seems like the type of person to give out presents, because Tommy is kind and funny and likes to show people that he cares. But this isn’t a can of soda, or a snack on a long shift, and it’s not handed over with hands shaking with excitement and a smile bright enough that it makes the corners of Benrey’s own mouth turn up, it’s a sheet of glass nailed against his wall while he slept, or rather, didn’t sleep, and even if Tommy did decide that Benrey absolutely needed this thing in his room he highly doubted that the scientist would be able to get in and hang it up without Benrey noticing. And- the most important part- Tommy is the last person on Earth who would ever put a very definite OSHA violation, a health hazard into Benrey’s room. 

So that removes the most likely candidate.

And Benrey’s other friends- he cares about them, of course, but he just can’t see it- he can’t see Jeff, who’s gruff and ex-military and has anger problems and is probably going to kick his ass for being late to their shift, ever wanting to hand something over without expecting something in return, and while Josh is so small it would explain the poor positioning of the mirror as he’d probably need a stool to go much higher, he works all the way over in the Biodome Complex and there’s no way he’d travel across the complex just to hang some mirror up in Benrey’s room and leave without a word, and they haven’t even spoken in a week because they had an argument about something stupid and haven’t had the chance to make up and they’ve both been so busy what with the upcoming test and Benrey spending less time in the cafeteria- and then there’s his other friend Josh, who’s more of a friend of a friend (that friend being Jeff), who works at a Gamestop in  Albuquerque and only visits once a year, and he gives plenty of gifts but it’s always second hand games with the price labels badly scraped off or a bottle of something that’s quickly stashed away in Jeff’s dorm, and it’s not that Benrey isn’t grateful for those, in fact he loves getting to play new games, he loves video games more than he loves life itself  _ (once Josh from Black Mesa jokingly suggested you would prefer it if your whole life were a video game and you weren’t sure why it made your head feel like it was being cleaved with an icepick but it made the whole day feel just a little more stilted and awkward than usual) _ but it just reinforces the idea that this mirror, this pane on his wall isn’t a gift, more a curse, and he doesn’t know how it got here and that genuinely terrifies him, because Benrey knows everything about Black Mesa. And that is not a metaphor, or an exaggeration. Benrey knows Black Mesa inside and out, he can point to every leaky pipe, every crack on the wall, every light that flickers and sparks, he can point to any scientist and he can’t tell you their name but he can probably tell you what department they’re from, or how long they’ve worked there, he can point you in the direction of any corridor or lab you want, and he can even tell you the things you he shouldn’t be able to tell you, like the name of the tall, pale man that skulks the corridors just a little slower than you’d like him to, things that you don’t want to know, and things that, by all account, he doesn’t want to know-

_ (And now that you think about it, why do you know? Because you don’t remember learning it, and you don’t know who would possibly have taught it; it’s like you just came in knowing, like you were born- no, made for this job-) _

So Benrey’s left staring at the wall again, with more questions that he started the day with. In fact, was the mirror even there when he got up? No, because he’s sure he would have noticed it, so in some time between pulling himself out of bed to get dressed and now a mirror has spawned- no, appeared in his room, and a fucked up, broken one at that, so if God was playing some sort of cruel trick on him it wasn’t even a good one.

Benrey crouches, and the Benrey in the mirror shifts- thank God for that- so the main missing piece is now splitting through the side of his head, covering one of his eyes, and the odd, splintered area just barely grazes his shoulder, distorting the messy room behind him. He leans in closer. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the mirror except from everything, its whole state and existence and reason for being Right Here, but to a passerby, to a stranger it’s just a mirror, albeit one in extreme disrepair- considering the state of everything else in Benrey’s room, it fits right in, or it would if it wasn’t for the fact it was Benrey’s room and Benrey knows he has no want or need for a mirror, especially not one that shows up uninvited, unprompted, without explanation or reason and shows a face so familiar-

_ (Kind of like-) _

There is one more person Benrey can think of that may have put the mirror in his room.

_ (He’s about average height, with broad shoulders, and dark hair that’s usually pulled back into a ponytail- but even then it’s too long for a job in a lab, really, a safety hazard, he could get himself hurt- he has lips that are usually pursed, or in a pout, or hidden by a pen being chewed on mid-thought, he has freckles dusting the bridge of his nose and cheeks and brow, the type that you can’t quite see without squinting, or without getting close enough you’re almost touching- and you’ve only ever seen each other from across a corridor, or a bad taco place, or a b- no, a basketball court in the recreation areas, and even from a distance you still saw his freckles so you must have been staring at him, but you can’t help it, because you don’t know him, and you know everyone- well, you don’t know everyone, but you know of everyone, but him, he’s different, there’s something wrong about him you can’t quite place, and you don’t know when he showed up or when he started working in Anomalous Materials and he’s never came by any door you’re stationed at, not yet, but you see him through the glass of an office window with his nose scrunched and tongue stuck out slightly in concentration, or still half-asleep with hair a mess, pacing the tram because he’s late again, or alone in the cafeteria, not eating, or if you’re really unlucky in a tight corridor when you’re just trying to get to the tram lines and go back to your room because you and your best friend Josh just had a really bad fight and you told him none of this was real and it didn’t even phase him, he just looked right through you and told the wall that you were crazy, and your chest hurts and your eyes hurt because you’ve been trying to cry for what feels like hours now, gripping the sides of a bathroom sink and barely even managing out these dry, choked sobs but not a single tear is rolling, and you can’t actually remember the last time you saw someone cry properly, or look like they were really enjoying a meal, or laugh in a way that sounded sincere, and you know everyone’s face but they all seem to blur together into one and look more similar by the day, just like the shitty hallways and rooms and corridors, but this corridor, this corridor is different because he’s in it, and you move a little too fast and brush your shoulder against his arm- he’s taller than you- and you don’t know how to describe it, because you’ve never felt anything like it, but you think this might be what pain is meant to feel like, and you hear him mumble something that might be an apology and you turn around to look at him, to shout, to scream, to ask him what his name is, to ask him why the world feels so dizzyingly wrong, to ask what your name is, to ask where you are, and not Black Mesa, where you really are, because you have a feeling he has to know, because he’s different, there’s something about him that’s different, something so achingly familiar in a world where everything seems wrong and you can’t remember a thing about your childhood but something about the back of his head and his voice and the feeling of his hand against yours, even for a moment, feels like what you think normal people call nostalgia, but before you can even think of where to start you look up and he looks back at you and there is nothing behind his eyes, just a darkness that seems to spiral and reach on forever, an emptiness that’s different to the emptiness of others, because when you look at Jeff or Josh or Josh or Tommy when they’re laughing there’s something, something, like a mimic, a cruel fake light that flickers like the fluorescent ones in his room, that provides light but no warmth, that’s purely functional, to trick you, to lull you into a false sense, but his is different because there’s nothing, no trap, no nothing- just empty, forever, like you weren’t supposed to look at him yet, like he’s not ready, like nobody’s in there and it’s just a body waiting for its soul to arrive and you’re not sure why you know this but you’re not sure why you know anything anymore, and you aren’t sure if any of this is real, and you aren’t sure if you’re real, and you can’t remember, and you don’t want to remember, because you almost remembered him and now everything is fucked, and there’s a mirror on your wall, and the crack in it is so deep and dark and you wish you could just crawl inside and maybe you’d go somewhere else, where you’re meant to go, if you have somewhere left to go, if there’s anywhere outside of here, if there’s a world beyond this room, or whatever room he’s in right now, if, if, if-) _

_ (If-) _

_ (Else-) _

_ (Then-) _

No.

He wouldn’t have put the mirror there, because Benrey doesn’t know him. They passed each other in a hallway once, he thinks. Benrey isn’t even sure of his name.

There’s a knock on his door, and Benrey jumps up like a spring, tearing his gaze away from the mirror to look across at the entrance to his room. Jeff is there, also in uniform, looking at Benrey through hooded eyes. He’s mad, Benrey can tell; his fists are balled. They always seem to be balled.

_ (He’s too far away, you have to get closer, you have to dig your hands into his skull and peel his eyes back and see what’s in there, if it’s dark and empty like the crack, like him, or if that sick fucking fake glow is there too, if your best friend is even real, or just another lifeless husk that’s somehow more lifelike than the only one of us that’s alive-) _

Benrey raises a hand. “Sup?”

“What the hell are you doing, man? I was waiting for the tram and you didn’t show up!”

“‘m just looking at this mirror.”

Jeff’s eyes widen, as though he’s confused  _ (and there’s something behind them, he can see it, and it sickens him, it makes him want to turn and drive his fist into the wall.) _ _   
_ _   
_ “Wh... what the hell are you talking about, Benrey? What mirror?”

_ (But you knew he was going to say that-) _

Because he had heard a quiet pop as soon as he’d turned away, and out of the corner of his eye, he swear he saw tiny lights, like it had disintegrated behind him, like it was never meant to be there in the first place, just a happy little accident placed by someone just out of his view, and removed when they thought he wasn’t looking- because if it disappeared in front of him then of course he would have thought something was wrong, but if it’s while he’s not looking maybe, just maybe, he can pass it off as a fluke and he won’t question it- because it’s important to keep up illusions, and it’s important to not let people know too much, because then they start asking questions you can’t answer, and realising things you might not want them to.

_ (He’s about average height, with broad shoulders, and dark hair in a ponytail, and when you saw him in that hallway with no distance or distractions you saw that he’s not real like the rest of them but also the closest thing to reality you’ve ever been able to fathom, and you hate it, you hate it, you hate him, it makes you sick, it makes your head spin, it makes you shake, and you hate the emptiness and how lost it makes you feel but you especially hate the way you can see every single freckle, every wrinkle, every crease from where he’s never laughed, every scar from a childhood this body’s never experienced, every grey hair, every joint, every corner, every polygon, every pixel- you hate every bit of it, and you hate him, you hate every word he’s saying to you, every string that’s being pulled from his mouth of his own volition, every action he’s choosing to make, every conscious decision, every single bit of warmth and familiarity and something that aches like an old movie or a song you haven’t heard in years, or a place from your childhood, a beach you haven’t visited in years, a beach you haven’t visited at all, a face without a name to put to it-) _

“Forget about it.” Benrey shrugs. “Let’s go.”

_ (And he’s going to be there today, you know it, you’re certain, and something’s going to happen, because it had to be him- this is his fault, you’re sure, because there’s something about him you just can’t shake, and you know his name, you have never been to a basketball court, you know your name, you know him, and you know why there’s no light behind his eyes at all-) _

Jeff seems pacified at that, eyes looking even duller than before. “I.. alright. What was that shit you were saying about a mirror?”

_ (And you hate him, and you hate his eyes-) _

_ (You-) _

_ (Eyes-) _

_ (I-) _

“Wuh? Oh, I- I dunno.”

_ (But I know everything.) _

_ (And I-) _

_ (I hate Gordon Freeman.) _

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
